This invention relates to techniques for presenting media to a group of users in an online environment. In today's work environment where people often work in offices located in different cities, it is common to do various types of media presentations, such as slide show presentations, using various types of computer networks, such as Intranets or the Internet. Typically, the presentations are done in conjunction with a telephone conference call, so that the participants can listen to and ask questions to the presenter.
In some cases, the slides used in the presentation are distributed to all the participants before the presentation, for example, through e-mail or by downloading the slides from a server to the participants' computers. During the presentation, each participant views her own copy of the slides on her computer using some kind of slideshow presentation software, for example, the PowerPoint® software application which can be obtained from Microsoft Inc. of Redmond, Wash. A challenge to this approach is to keep the slides synchronized amongst the participants during the presentation. Typically, the moderator must tell the participants whenever he changes slides and verbally state what slide he is on. If a participant were to miss a slide number announcement, he may get confused and not realize that the presenter is talking about a different slide.
In other cases, no slides are provided to the participants in advance of the presentation. Instead, some kind of web conferencing solution is used. One commonly used web conferencing system is provided by WebEx Communications Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. In the web conferencing solution, the presenter and participants register with a web service, and during the presentation a bitmap representation of what is shown on the presenter's computer screen is transmitted to all the participants in real time and displayed in a web browser. That is, no special software is required to be installed on the presenter's or participants' computers. However, the participants lack the ability of going back and forth between slides as the presentation is going on, and can only view the slide that is currently selected by the presenter.